Data processing systems, such as personal computers, tablet computers, entertainment systems, game consoles, and cellular telephones, commonly include a human interface device (HID) for data input and/or controlling cursor movement. One widely utilized HID is a touch pad or touchscreen utilizing a touch sensor, such as a capacitive or resistive sensing system, to sense and measure proximity, position, displacement or acceleration of an object, such as a finger or stylus. Another HID utilizes an optical finger navigation system or ONS, which uses changes in an image or pattern of light reflected from an object position on or over a surface of the HID to detect and measure proximity, position, displacement or acceleration of the object. Existing capacitive or resistive touch sensors suffer from a number of disadvantages including limited tracking resolution, and limited tracking speed. In addition, touchscreens utilizing capacitive sensing systems have difficulty tracking objects covered by most types of electrically insulating material, such as a gloved finger. However, ONS utilized in existing optical track-pad and optical track-ball applications are prone to manufacturing process variation, requiring a high level of optical calibration, have large performance variation across tracking speeds, and have a relatively small active-area due to limitations of light sources used. In addition, because ONS work well only within a narrow range around a nominal design height separating the object from the ONS and due to the lift-cutoff requirement in most applications that using ONS lift detection is necessary to detect when the ONS is separated from the object by more than a maximum lift-height to prevent spurious data from the HID. Previous ONS that rely on an optical lift-cut-off mechanism based on image defocus are not satisfactory for non-image based ONS. In addition, non-image-defocus based optical lift-cut-off mechanism employed in the non-image based ONS, is sensitive to manufacturing process variation, requiring rather tight manufacturing tolerances, and/or reducing tracking.